Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring.
Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration.
Matt's analogy works well for transactional hiring like hiring contractors but doesn't really translate well to situations where the mutual expectation is that we're going to spend a lot of time working together for at least the next few years. Most companies that are hiring engineers often need teams of people to bake bread. Sometimes those teams are huge and often the bakers in those teams are responsible for granular (pun intended) steps to ensure the bread is the best bread it can be. So, if I want some good bread and I intend to have a team of 40 bakers with individual strengths and disparate responsibilities baking that bread, then soon enough the responsibilities will become so granular that actually, I do need at least one baker capable of drawing a valid orbital configuration. Now that I've found a baker with strong quantum mechanics skills, I now need to figure out if they are going to be a horrible human to work with.
This is why referral hiring always has been and still is king. There's no greater hiring test than working with someone for a few years before deciding if they are any good at their job.
except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere
I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate
I remember the first time I worked at a company that did referral hiring that skipped the interview process.
The first few hires were amazing. Everyone thought we had struck gold: Just find people your employees can vouch for, and hire them! Why didn't anyone else think of this?
Then we got a referral hire who turned out to be rather bad at everything, from coding to getting along with people. And another who was really entry-level, but their friend had referred them as being much more competent. Then we started screening more, and caught a referral candidate who barely knew anything about the things their friend had vouched for them having had done.
So we went back to using referrals as an additional signal, but they still had to go through the interview process.
That's the problem: Some people will only refer truly excellent candidates. Other people will just refer their friends regardless of their skills.
It very quickly becomes a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back" networking game, where people refer all of their friends with hopes that those friends will return the favor in the future.
Referral bonuses led to this being gamed too. Tech companies giving ~$5k out for a hired referral - people would bring in literal strangers and claimed they worked with them. There is/was even a market for referrals on blind and suchlike.
I'm not saying referral hiring is executed well. It's really poorly executed. When I look at the data of companies I've hired for and tracked the success rates of referral hires, they systematically perform better than average.
Those people pass both tests -- referral and standard hiring. To me the question hinges on whether people refer people who might fail standard screening, or if they're just cherry picking in ways your analysis "discovers."
The difference to employers might be moot I suppose, but if you want to substitute referral for standard hiring screens you kinda need to get at something like this to know if referrals are contributing any new information or just boosting hit ratios on existing tests.
The latter is the assumption most of us are making. People tend to refer people based on an intrinsic understanding that 1) I know what my friend likes and I think they will like working here and 2) I know what my employer likes and I think they will like my friend.
No2 is usually formed by a good understanding of how a company measures success in any given role. You'll find the same principle applies to good recruiters. The more a recruiter understands about how your company measures success, the more likely they are to submit candidates that will pass your interview process.
There can be an element of politics to rejecting a referral hire. Your coworker may not want you to be stacking the team with "your people". Petty and sad but it happens.
Back in the '00s, referrals were a bonus if they were able to hire the person away from their current employer. I was a referral from a person who I regularly met at the Irish pub in Mountain View (the SGI / Netapp thirsty Thursday - one was on the decline while the other was on the way up). When the $1000 went through, a round of drinks was bought for the group.
Now it seems that referrals are a "You want a referral? Like me on Linked In and I'll put your name in."
Instead of a few high quality referrals over the course of a year it is dozens of people trying to skip the first filter a month.
I've been with my current employer for 18 months. I was a referral and the person who referred me got a $15,000 bonus. I've since referred 2 people. I've gotten one bonus so far and the other should be here in ~3 months. 3 of the 5 companies I've worked for in ~20 in this industry came through my network. Anecdotes but it's worked fine for me.
The only time my referrals haven't been given immediate, obvious special treatment was when it was a referral at a large company, submitted directly to HR through some internal referral webpage. That basically guaranteed them an interview but otherwise didn't move them along. All of my other referrals have been made in-person directly to my manager (or someone up the org chart) and they have invariably been given an offer after an abbreviated interview process.
My last place of employment took my referrals and treated them like garbage, including ghosting a former VP. I asked many times why they hadn’t contacted him and they ultimately pinned the blame on their contract recruiter. Also saw multiple engineer referrals get burned by our asinine hiring process. And this was a small startup that was desperate for more people.
I've experienced the same thing in recent years. Referrals are just another way to put a resume into the ATS. I have no opportunity to actually expend any social or political capital to bring that person in. I get excluded from the hiring loop to avoid bias. I basically become a human "Apply" button.
> Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration.
That's the thing now. That's how they interview for bakers
After working under them for two decades I’ve come to realize GenX is gripped and captivated not by traditional religious story, but recent American history.
I’m early 40s, of the Xennial persuasion and mostly work with under 35 year olds now. The number of under 35s who openly admit they don’t believe any of this bullshit about tech, who see it as just marketing and advertising is wild to me. GenZ are way different people than GenX who mumble something about the greatness of capitalism unironically and just shuffle over to their laptop and ignore how tired they are of pretending their make work job updating some SQL is the future of technology; Hiro Protagonist and Capt Kirk are their spirit animals
GenX just the latest middle management to demand the kids likewise fill the hole in their souls with boring API config and repetitive leetcode to addict people to screen use, a toxic energy hog.
Line must go up! The catechism’s and chants of MBAified American Civic Life: The Religion must be recited! No physics demands this routine of is just socialized ramble, so it’s religious belief in that it’s decoupled from reality outside us. It’s tribal nonsense
It’s super corny obsession with pop culture memes of the last 50 years, outdated belief ST:TNG is right around the corner if we believe hard enough
Unless you are one of the top 1% tech companies out there, what you said doesn’t really compute. All tech companies out there think they need to produce the “best bread” therefore they need the best bakers. It’s not realistic, but hey if investors are giving you millions to spend, sure thing you need to spent that money somehow.
if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way.
Well, yes of course. As you said yourself, there's an abundance of people applying for jobs. When you have two bakers apply for your job, you'll keep things simple and hire one. When you have two hundred bakers apply for your job, you can introduce levels of complexity in the hope it will help you identify the best bakers of the 200.
Asking people irrelevant questions and rejecting them on irrelevant grounds is a lot sillier than just rejecting people because you have too many applications.
Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration.
Matt's analogy works well for transactional hiring like hiring contractors but doesn't really translate well to situations where the mutual expectation is that we're going to spend a lot of time working together for at least the next few years. Most companies that are hiring engineers often need teams of people to bake bread. Sometimes those teams are huge and often the bakers in those teams are responsible for granular (pun intended) steps to ensure the bread is the best bread it can be. So, if I want some good bread and I intend to have a team of 40 bakers with individual strengths and disparate responsibilities baking that bread, then soon enough the responsibilities will become so granular that actually, I do need at least one baker capable of drawing a valid orbital configuration. Now that I've found a baker with strong quantum mechanics skills, I now need to figure out if they are going to be a horrible human to work with.
This is why referral hiring always has been and still is king. There's no greater hiring test than working with someone for a few years before deciding if they are any good at their job.